RIPE Atlas Roadmap: October 2012 UpdateWhile developing RIPE Atlas, we are maintaining and publishing a roadmap to keep the RIPE community involved and informed of the features we are working on. Please find below our achievements in October, and plans for November 2012 and beyond.https://labs.ripe.net/Members/becha/ripe-atlas-roadmap-october-2012-updatehttps://labs.ripe.net/logo.png

RIPE Atlas Roadmap: October 2012 Update

While developing RIPE Atlas, we are maintaining and publishing a roadmap to keep the RIPE community involved and informed of the features we are working on. Please find below our achievements in October, and plans for November 2012 and beyond.

We have
4,654
RIPE Atlas users
- an increase of 1,387 since last month!

Figure 1: Dramatic increase of registered "users" in October 2012

We wanted to increase the reach of RIPE Atlas by making an extra effort to distribute probes at training courses and conferences. In fact, we became a victim of our own success; after the RIPE Atlas presentation at the recent
ENOG 4
meeting in Moscow, we got featured in a popular Russian technology blog, and within a week received 900 requests for RIPE Atlas probes! This explains the recent increase in the number of RIPE Atlas users.

We will not be able to respond immediately to all 900 requests, and we are working on finding local organisations to help us with distribution within Russia.

Achievements in October

We made
a new Internet Traffic Map
available, making it possible to compare TCP and UDP DNS measurements on the same map. It shows the reply time to the SOA query of a particular root DNS server over the selected transport protocol (UDP, TCP or a comparison of the two) for each RIPE Atlas probe.

The
RIPE Atlas anchor pilot
continues
:
we have selected ten organisations to host the first ten RIPE Atlas anchors this year, based on the results of a detailed survey. If you are interested in this pilot, please join
the mailing list
.

We got two new sponsors:
AFNIC
and
Visma
.Thank you!

New benefits for sponsors this month are:

Easier host administration: sponsors can see all of their probes, including those not yet activated by the host

Sponsors got access to the "Test IPv6" feature, usually available only to RIPE NCC members

Users can now see credit earnings and consumptions by downloading monthly credits reports. We also have all the old credit transactions archived. Also, a reminder: it is not a new feature, but you can easily transfer credits from one user to another with one click (see image below).

The new firmware release will allow users to clearly see the difference between the probe rebooting and disconnecting, and will fix a few known bugs.

You can now follow the rate of deployment of RIPE Atlas probes over time with the updated
distribution and status of probes graphs
. We have introduced a new category, "written off" probes, and we have published the same data in the "relative" format, as a percentage of all the distributed probes rather than the absolute numbers (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Probes deployment, relative to distributed probes

We are cooperating with the
NLNOG RING
to join efforts. This will help us get more feedback from the operators community on real-life use cases for RIPE Atlas.

Plans for November

Improving resiliency by removing single points of failure. For example, if there is a network disconnect, there will be no loss of collected measurement results, only a delay
.

Improving overall stability
by making each component more stable and minimising the impact of a failure on the users.

In addition to that, we will be working on the following new features:

Deploying the first RIPE Atlas anchors.

In order to remind you if your probe is not plugged in or if it is down, we will add more automatic email notifications of events.

We will work on increasing the number of active probes by reaching out to users to activate probes that are down.

We will start making RIPE Atlas more known to the wider community by moving some publicly available information to the main
RIPE NCC website.

We were looking at several alternative devices, and we are now seriously considering the TP-Link model TL-MR 3020. Although this model is a wireless travel router, we will re-purpose it to perform measurements. It is cheaper, has more memory storage, and has more LEDs than the current probes, while also fulfilling all of our requirements. In the image below you can see what they look like.

Figure 4: Future RIPE Atlas probes (coming in 2013)

We are going to make it easier to access member-specific RIPE Atlas services, both from the RIPE Atlas user interface and from the LIR Portal. Currently, 1,506 RIPE Atlas users are members of the RIPE NCC.

We will publish monthly top-ten lists in order to promote users with the longest uptime and those who spend the most credits.

Plans for the next three to six months

We are starting to work on "fast track" measurements, expecting to have them available in a few months.

Providing APIs for controlling measurements and getting access to data.

We hope to make it easier to perform large-scale measurements by lifting all of the limitations (except daily credit consumption).

Make UDMs more flexible and more efficient. Some specific features were requested by beta-testers, such as:

Finding suitable probes to replace probes that no longer execute a UDM

Automatically stopping the measurement if a user runs out of credits

Adding newer probes to the running measurements

We will create additional Internet traffic maps based on RIPE Atlas data, to illustrate the health (e.g. reachability) of measured networks.

2 Comments

Leo Vegoda
says:

02 Nov, 2012 08:46 PM

Why is the number of LEDs on the probe important?

BECHA
says:

05 Nov, 2012 02:09 PM

Leo, "Increased number of LEDs" was supposed to be followed by the :) OTOH, they are just there, and we might want to use them to create LED-art... or indicate other events on the probes, if possible <wild imagination> yellow for your probe being used as a source, orange if used as destination</wild imagination>.

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